


The Sad Intangible

by trinityofone



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, M/M, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 17:51:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16202594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ryan jokes.Shane swallows heavily. “I think I did.”





	The Sad Intangible

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be some fun fluffy smut, written as a break from the ridiculous epic I am working on. It is...notably not that. Sorry. But I hope you enjoy it anyway!
> 
> Many thanks to Siria, for mad beta and Latin skillz. Title is from T.S. Eliot's "To Walter de la Mare."
> 
> Disclaimer: This is as real as Underwater Area 51.

Ryan doesn’t see the ghost. But Shane does.

What Ryan sees is: Mark lowering his lens as Ryan turns to explain his ideas for the next set-up. Then, in his peripheral vision, the wild flailing of Shane’s arm. He turns his head just as Shane grabs his shoulder, as Shane says his name—“Ryan. _Ryan_!”—and whipping around he sees the same dark, empty room he’s been looking at for the last forty minutes, the bare patch of cracked floorboards where Shane is pointing. Nothing else. Maybe a shadow. But really—nothing.

When in his confusion he looks back up at Shane, Shane’s eyes are wide, his normally animated features drawn and slack. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ryan jokes, still not getting it.

But then Shane swallows heavily and in a small voice he says, “I think I did.”

* * *

Of course the first thing they do is frantically review the footage. Unfortunately when it happened, Mark wasn’t actively shooting, so what he has are a bunch of frames of Ryan’s chest and left elbow. Ryan’s GoPro has some fantastic shots of Mark not getting anything. Which leaves Shane’s GoPro and handheld. Shane—who actually saw it, who was looking in the right direction. Shane, whose immediate reaction was to reach across his own body to clumsily grope for Ryan, and who therefore got a magnificent extended shot of a flapping red and black plaid sleeve.

Ryan had been standing on Shane’s right. The reason Shane had reached for him with his left hand and not the nearer right was that he’d been holding his iPhone rig in his right hand. “So that probably maintained the best angle,” Ryan starts to theorize, but before Ryan’s even pressed play—everyone having silently handed _him_ all the equipment for the review—Shane’s shaking his head and looking away in disgust.

“You asked me to hold the Spirit Box. I was holding. The goddamn. _Spirit Box_.”

Ryan had indeed asked him to hold the goddamn Spirit Box. Just for a second, while he hashed things out with Mark. And even though Shane hated it, he had taken it, and held it carefully, and let his rig cant down against the base of his palm to film the side of his right boot for two minutes.

You can see the boot move when Shane sees whatever he saw, when he jumps and lunges for Ryan. But that’s all.

“The fucking. _Spirit Box_ ,” Shane says, with a vague gesture toward the ceiling. Then he walks out of the room.

“Wait!” Ryan calls. “Let’s wait here a bit—maybe she’ll come back! It was a _she_ , right? Do you think it was her—Lillian? _Shane_?”

TJ makes a face at him. “He went outside, dude.”

“Oh.” Ryan really wants to stay here and see this ghost. On the other hand… “Should I go after him?”

“Give him a minute,” Mark advises.

So they wait. And wait.

They do not see a ghost.

Shane doesn’t come back inside.

* * *

He’s sitting on the porch steps when they come out. He doesn’t look frightened, or even particularly upset. He’s eating a granola bar. He glances up at Ryan as the screen door creaks.

He doesn’t say, “Well?” but Ryan thinks he reads a flicker of hope in his expression. Ryan’s depressed and disappointed already, and it hurts to have to shake his head and watch Shane’s jaw tighten again. 

“All right,” Shane says. He stands, crumpling the wrapper from his granola bar and tucking it into his pocket.

They pile into the car and head back to the motel. They’re more than halfway there when Ryan realizes that he’s in the midst of what should be his moment of triumph. _Shane saw a ghost_. He _admitted it_. That, at least, they captured very vividly on camera. And yet Ryan looks over at his co-host, slumped against the passenger-side door and not even looking at the phone he’s holding loosely in his lap, and he doesn’t feel like crowing. He actually feels kind of queasy. 

The others must feel it too—at the very least a heaviness hanging over them all. No one proposes a late-night snack or drink. They mumble their goodnights and retreat to their rooms. Ryan’s sharing with Shane and he watches as Shane goes about his bedtime routine—all normal, every step familiar after all this time. He’s just quiet as he does it. They hardly talk—Shane says “excuse me” as he slides between Ryan and his suitcase to enter the bathroom and Ryan realizes it’s the first thing either of them have said in ten minutes. They haven’t discussed the footage, their plans for the edit, all the things they typically talk about after a shoot. Shane hasn’t teased Ryan once. Silently, he comes out of the bathroom, stretches out on his bed, rolls over, and turns off the light.

“What…” Ryan hesitates, staring into the dark.

Shane’s voice is level. “Go on.”

“What did she look like?”

There’s a considerable pause. Ryan can hear Shane breathing.

Then, “Unhappy,” he says.

He doesn’t elaborate and Ryan’s afraid to ask for clarification. He listens to Shane’s slow, even breaths until Shane rolls over and falls asleep.

* * *

Ryan doesn’t let himself think it—not until they’re back in L.A. editing the episode. Ryan sits with the actual editors while they go over significant parts of the footage; he listens to anything that could be anything on the EVP recorder—all the things he usually does. And, same as always, when he thinks he has something that could be a real thing, he calls Shane into the studio for his opinion. 

Here’s what he has: a vague, dark shape to the right and below Shane’s sleeve before it fully blocks the frame. And from Mark’s footage, a blobby shadow reflected in the window behind Ryan’s elbow that you can just barely see if you really really zoom in on it.

“Well, this is some bullshit,” Shane says.

“Isn’t that where you saw her—it?” Ryan asks, pointing. He hits a couple buttons and runs Mark’s footage again, frame by frame. “See, you can kind of pick out—”

“It’s nothing, Ryan. It’s a big ol’ heap of nothing.” Shane rubs his hands down the length of his thighs, then shifts, folds his arms. “If _you_ ’d seen something, and you came to me with this… I’m sorry, it’s just total garbage.”

The words are angry, but his voice is flat. Matter-of-fact. Ryan stares up at him, and Shane shrugs. “Sorry,” he says again.

It’s a very particular brand of _sorry_ , one that even Google Translate could figure out means _Sorry I can’t tell you to go fuck yourself_.

Ryan can feel his indignation rising; it’s sort of like heartburn. “I’m trying to _help_!” he says. “I want to believe you and—”

He stops because Shane is smirking and Ryan already knows he’s just fucked himself.

“‘Want to,’” Shane says. “You want to, but you don’t. The great believer didn’t see it with his _own two eyes_ , and so…” Shane produces an epic eyeroll. “Eat your heart out, Alanis Morissette.”

Ryan’s heart is thudding. The thought he’d been trying so very hard not to have is careening around his head like a pinball. He feels his fists clench.

“You,” he says—he’d like to imagine cuttingly—“are being a very bad sport.”

Shane shrugs again. “Well. Good thing I hate sports.”

_It’s over_ , Ryan thinks, even before Shane turns and walks out. They’ve broken the show.

* * *

Except an hour later, Shane takes him aside and apologizes. “I was out of line,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

They go back over the footage—on camera this time, and Shane does his best to narrate what he saw over the unimpressive evidence. “She was lying on the floor—I guess she did look like the pictures you showed me of Lillian Abbot. The clothes were the right period, ‘60s-ish—a white mini-dress. One second there was nothing there and then there was this woman with long dark hair. She looked pretty solid. She kicked her feet and pounded the floor with her fists and then she sank through the floor and was gone.”

“Wow,” Ryan says—because, _wow_.

Shane shrugs. He looks a little bashful, but he’s collected himself. He’s calm.

“I can’t explain it,” he says. He gestures toward the monitors. “And I can’t prove it. I guess I just have to accept that it’s something I saw.”

He looks at Ryan. Ryan knows he should be hamming it up right now, celebrating his victory for the camera. _#ripshaniacs #WOOgaras #shanesawaghostsoryansrightabouteverythingobviously_

“Look at him,” Shane says, doing Ryan’s job for him. “His triumph has rendered him mute. It’s a hollow victory, Shaniacs, but at least we’ve made it so that he can never theorize that anything with a perfectly mundane and reasonable explanation is actually aliens ever again.”

“Shut up, Shane.”

But it’s his own brain he wishes he could get to shut up. _You’ve broken the show_ , it whispers.

_It’s totally broken._

_You broke it._

* * *

Ryan bids Shane an unusually awkward goodnight at the end of the day—it involves waving—and as he heads out to the parking lot, the litany still hasn’t ceased. He rolls up his windows and tries blasting Jay-Z at top volume, but that does nothing to drown it out, and neither does the score to _Hellraiser_ , nor—in a pointless act of desperation—does NPR. He’s two thirds of the way home when he comes to a decision and makes an abrupt and illegal U-turn, prompting a chorus of angry honking and a rush of relief at his own decisive action. This feeling is swiftly buried under more anxiety as he then has to fight through another forty-five minutes of traffic, because Los Angeles.

He’s sweating by the time he badly parallel parks down the block from Shane’s apartment, but he’s feeling better because he has the fix now, he knows the solution. He jogs up Shane’s steps and knocks on Shane’s door and when Shane opens it, he grins up at Shane’s surprised face. 

“We just don’t air the episode,” he says.

“Oh, Ryan,” Shane says, and with a sigh, steps away from the door to let him in.

“Look, eating the cost will suck,” Ryan says, “but we’ll figure out something else that we can film on set. It’s not that good of an episode anyway; this was never one of my favorite stories, we can totally find something better. It’ll be better for the show if we _don’t_ air it; no one will even have to know—”

“This brilliant argument for artistic honesty aside,” Shane says, turning around, “ _I’ll_ know, Ryan.”

“Yeah, but—” Ryan stops. He doesn’t really have a _but_ there.

“I’ll still have seen her,” Shane says, and this time when he crosses his arms, he doesn’t look angry or annoyed. He meets Ryan’s gaze for a second and then looks away.

Shane’s walls have a bunch of nice, framed art on them, almost like an adult apartment, and Ryan wants to punch a dozen giant holes in the plaster. Instead he sits down on Shane’s couch.

“It’s over, then,” he says.

“What?”

“The show.” He forces himself to say it out loud: “We broke the show.”

Shane looks like he needs a minute. “Ryan,” he says, after only about thirty seconds, “everything I believe about _life_ and about _death_ and about _the nature of the entire fucking universe_ has been irrevocably altered. Forgive me if my first and only thought isn’t for the goddamn _show_.”

There are a lot of things Ryan wants to say. Things that start _It’s not just the_ — and _The show is more than_ — and _Shane, listen, I_ — But he feels his lip quiver and he realizes that he’s maybe about to cry. And he can’t do that, not in front of Shane, not now or ever.

“Well I guess we just shot the series finale then,” Ryan says, voice way too loud. He’s on his feet, past Shane, halfway out the door. “Ghosts are real. There. Fucking _solved_ it.”

All the way to the car, he still half thinks Shane is going to come after him.

He’s kind of stupid like that.

* * *

Ryan seriously thinks about calling in sick the next day—he’s experiencing enough gut-churning nausea that it wouldn’t even really be a lie. But the longer he considers, the more he realizes that if this is to be the end—the unannounced, unplanned series finale—he wants it to be the best episode they’ve ever made. _We will not go quietly into the night_ , and all that other cool stuff President Bill Pullman said in _Independence Day_.

So he heads into work, fully intending to lock himself in the editing bay. Instead, from the moment he enters the office, a stupid, sentimental urge guides his feet, and without a conscious decision, he starts making his way to their set. 

He can’t help himself. He wants to say goodbye.

He steps through the door and stops. The lights are off, and unlit, it really doesn’t look like much: just a desk, a couple of chairs, and some junk. It’s kind of amazing how much in-jokey stuff they packed in here in really only two years. Ryan reaches out and trails his fingers over the edge of the desk. He tangles his thumb in the cord of the rotary phone, taps Timmy’s ball, flicks the chain of the green glass banker’s lamp. He prods at the handle of Shane’s abandoned mug. It’s empty; it’s been washed; probably it will end up in the staff kitchen and the next time it’s used, some intern will be drinking coffee from the office’s horrible Keurig from it.

Ryan has a weird moment where he thinks about smashing the mug.

But he pulls his hand back, and, turning to look at the wall with Brent’s missing poster, lets out a high-pitched shriek.

“Well at least I haven’t _fully_ lost my touch,” Shane says.

“What the fuck,” Ryan says. Shane’s standing so close to their dummy he’s practically got his arm around it, leaning against the wall in the corner like a total _creep_. “What are you even doing in here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?”

Oh, so they’re answering questions with questions? “How long have you been standing there?”

But trust Shane to abruptly stop playing: “About ten minutes.” Which is such a Shane answer, too: not melodramatic— _hours!_ —but not playing it cool either, like, _oh, I just got here_. Matter of fact and honest. Ten minutes.

“Oh,” Ryan says. 

He looks at the floor. This is how he knows they broke the show: he no longer has any idea how to talk to Shane.

“Listen—” he starts to say, in spite of not knowing he wants Shane to listen to, but mercifully Shane has also chosen that moment to start speaking: “Do you want to know what I really hate about ghosts?”

This is firmer, more familiar territory. “That they exist?” Ryan shoots back.

Shane shakes his head. “About the idea of them,” he says. He unfolds from his lean and takes a step closer to Ryan, spine as straight as it ever is, hands held loosely behind his back.

“What, then?”

“You know how annoying people say ‘YOLO’?” Shane seems to consider this a perfectly reasonable shift in topic. “Actually,” he continues, “ _you’ve_ probably dropped a YOLO or two in your time, now that I think about it. That’s terrible, Ryan; you should stop.”

Ryan’s not sure why he’s allowing himself to stand here and be accused of saying YOLO—listen, he had a full and rich college experience for which he feels he shouldn’t be judged—but he is. “I’ll try never to burden your ears with that abominable expression,” he says.

“Thanks. Anyway, the thing is, I’ve actually always found the fact of the singular, limited human lifespan reassuring. No matter what happens, no matter what goes wrong, in a hundred years—” He shrugs. “—Well, we’ll all be dead. Mistakes have a shelf life. There is a limit to suffering”

He pauses, then lets out a long breath. “Fucking ghosts, though—” Shane unclasps his hands and lets them drop down to his sides with a sigh. “Ryan,” he says, “do you _honestly_ like the idea that you could easily doom yourself to an eternity of anguish? That you could become trapped in an endless cycle of your regret?”

“It’s not a matter of liking,” Ryan says, although he can feel Shane’s words vibrating through his chest like a struck gong. “I don’t _like_ the idea of death, either—unlike some people. But if that’s the way things are…”

“And that doesn’t scare you?” Shane says.

“ _Everything_ scares me.”

Ryan’s joking, but Shane isn’t when he replies: “It scares _me_.”

Seeing Shane afraid, much like seeing Shane see a ghost, is significantly less satisfying than Ryan thought it would be.

“No, come on.” Shane’s so skillful at talking _him_ down; Ryan feels unpracticed and outmatched. “There can’t be that much that you regret. I mean, Lillian Abbot abandoned her family and then was either murdered by her lover or accidentally OD’d on drugs…I don’t think you’ve done anything like that?”

He laughs a little, hoping to inspire Shane, but Shane looks so bleakly serious than anyone who didn’t know him so well would be speculating about his secret spouse and/or hidden methamphetamine habit. 

“Or I guess,” Ryan tries, “if this is about something you haven’t done—I mean, you may be a decrepit old man, but you’re not _that_ old. You can still—” Shane’s making a weird face. “What?” A horrible/wonderful thought strikes Ryan. “Or if you’re thinking about the show, I haven’t actually officially—”

“ _Still_ not about the show,” Shane says. “Jesus, Ryan, you’re—”

His movement is abrupt: a long, sudden stride forward. Swiftly, he ducks his head, and before Ryan can really register what’s happening, Shane’s taken his face in both his big hands and is pressing a brief, brutal kiss to Ryan’s mouth.

“—Impossible,” he finishes, pulling back. Then he says, “ _There_ ”—all determined and self-satisfied, as if he’s proven some grand point to himself, as opposed to having just been really confusing.

“What,” Ryan says.

Shane’s backing away. Ryan realizes that he doesn’t want Shane to be backing away. He reaches out and grabs a handful of Shane’s shirt. “What was that?” he says.

“I kissed you,” Shane explains.

“Why would you do that.” Ryan’s clinging to Shane’s shirt, reeling him in. Then his right hand moves down and finds solider ground on the flat plane of Shane’s hip.

“Because I hate ghosts,” Shane says. “And I don’t want to be one.”

Their chests are very close together. Ryan can feel Shane’s heart racing. He’s not sure what to do with his legs. His butt hits the edge of the desk and it suddenly makes sense that he should hop up onto it, sit so he can give Shane space between his thighs. 

“I don’t want you to be a ghost,” Ryan says. “Even if it proved everything. I wouldn’t want to see you.” He’s digging his thumbs into Shane’s hips hard enough to bruise. “Don’t you dare haunt me, Shane—”

Ryan hardly knows what he’s saying; he’s acting on instinct. But he knows what he’s doing when he kisses Shane. It’s terrifying: to tilt his head back, to reach for him. And yet in the terror is an ecstatic thrill. Up until this moment it had been inconceivable to him that he could want this. That Ryan could ever _allow_ himself to want this, to want Shane.

That Shane would want Ryan.

Shane’s kisses are intensely focused, but slow, almost lazy. He kisses like kissing is all he cares about, like it’s more than merely a stop on the road to more interesting destinations. Ryan feels frantic, kissing him, and then that frenzy dies, and he’s moving with Shane, slow and languid and unhurried. Shane clearly doesn’t care about the not entirely remote possibility of somebody else coming in, and the thought makes Ryan’s insides squirm; it makes him close his legs around Shane’s thigh and rut against it.

Shane makes a noise, and he falls forward and Ryan falls back, and there is a loud crash as a number of in-jokey items are haphazardly shoved off the edge of the desk.

The possibility that someone’s going to come up here to check if the _Unsolved_ set is haunted and catch them is now substantially less remote, but Ryan still holds Shane’s body against his for a beat or two more, kisses him softly, laughs, nips at his swollen lower lip. 

“I don’t care if everyone sees, I wanna show you off to everybody,” Shane murmurs, and Ryan hates him a little for creating even that distance, for drawing back. “But if we get caught _here_ , I really do think they’ll cancel our show.”

Look, Ryan knows there are probably more significant elements at play here, but his heart still issues a thump when Shane says _our show_.

“You’re right,” he forces himself to say. He releases his hold on Shane’s neck, and Shane levers himself up. Ryan clutches at Shane’s skinny forearms to do the same, just because he doesn’t want to let go entirely. “I mean, not about ghosts, as has been amply shown, but—”

“ _One_ ghost,” Shane says.

Ryan’s eyes flick up. “Oh no, nope—”

“ _One_ ghost—one _unidentifiable phenomenon_ —does not prove the existence of ghosts _in toto_ , Ryan, that would be ridiculous. _Quod non erat demonstrandum_.”

“Are you freaking kidding me right now? _You’re_ ridiculous. I can’t believe I let you kiss me with that Latin-spouting m—oh shit.” Something is crunching emphatically beneath his shifting heel. He looks down to inspect the damage he may have just done to his poor innocent sneaker and is shocked and dismayed to see the floor covered in shards of green glass. “Our lamp!”

He reaches down and picks up the brass base. The green glass shade is in about a thousand pieces. Ryan has a vague memory of his elbow striking it, but at the time he wasn’t particularly concerned with the sensations in his elbow.

“We broke it,” he says sadly.

But Shane is shaking his head. He takes the broken pieces from Ryan’s hands; _takes_ Ryan’s hands. His fingers stroke over Ryan’s knuckles as he smiles down at Ryan fondly, like a dope.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Ryan. It’s just a lamp.”

**Author's Note:**

> #riplamp


End file.
